Cathy Alter writes in McSweeney’s: Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of the epistemophilic instinct, an unbridled love of learning that grips scholars like fingernails in their backs. But when a reader at London’s Public…

This shattering note, in which a mental patient alludes to herself as being confined in a Nazi concentration camp, was recovered from the estate of a doctor who practiced at Willard Psychiatric Hospital, in Willard, NY. In its half-coherent, broken language, it poignantly expresses the crushing, all-pervasive hopelessness and regret of a mental health inmate confronting her mortality:

“Dear Jesus,I am sorry I cannot help you. I tried to spread my grace because of the Britian Prophescy and the German Prophescy Due to cutterage of the Head, Heart, stomach and Reproductive Organs. I am no longer going to be living. I tried as a prophet and person. I don’t even want to be an animal. For what a person does to an animal. I wish to stay in my grave. And not rise again from the Grave.

I have seen too much to life. Now I am blind and deaf. And have lost my feeling too.

I am not Jewish but was put in a Nazi Concentration Camp. And haven’t been released. And I have sinned too. But the Master-Mind won’t let me forget it.